FELIX THE CAT!Wow, great t-shirt design, two colors, if you call black & white color!

. . . and of course "The Hick Chick". All time favorite gag when the hero is about to fight the villian and the villian pulls out a hand full of bird seed that character immediately goes after.

TEX AVERY - "Symphony in Slang"

"Symphony in Slang" was another of my all time favorite cartoons. This background makes me want to sit down and paint. What color & design!

Here is some inspiration from my Tex Avery book. These wolf cartoons he did were my absolute favorite. Great character, design and the voice also was up there for why I loved these cartoons.

How they register that right foot over under the chair is beyond me. Why do you think?

Here's a funny mouth shape as Larry gets bonked on the head!

Mr. Jinks whisker study. I have a hard time drawing whiskers on my character Extra Tall Cat so I thought I would do some study on how Hanna Barbara did theirs. I learned what a big nose Mr. Jinks has. and how much the facial elements really do feel like a real cat.
They kept the whisker out of the way of the mouth and eyes, (except for the side-view above). The Bow-Tie is always front view messing with no collar. If there was a collar it's hidden. He never is seen from the back like on the Simpsons. I made me notice how much I mess around with suspenders and fabric on the hat and on the pants . . etc. . . .

. . . these drawings all have ONLY three lines to describe the body!

This wobbly mouthed character was a perfect study to tone down Laughing Larry's wobble mouth. Notice when he's laughing the wobble shape does not get even more wobbly. On other hand, it depends on the voice and how it works with the acting.

Other characters with this "wobbly mouth" Wally Gator, Snaggle Puss and Snookles who's on the post below.

"Snookles" Final (name relocated bigger, thicker lines)

"Snookles" Color Baby Blue & Baby Pink - 2 Color T-Shirt Design

Possible "Snookles" T-Shirt Design

"Snookles" Rough with Tweaks

Body is still off, will have to zerox up original.

I used the body from this scene

and the close up from this scene

Here's the real Stray Cats logo I was drawing in my other blog.

In a perfect world I'd like to have a budget and people who can animate background characters to make the scene more interesting like in Walt Disney films. I have a bird feeder and the birds come and clear out the feeder once a week.

I wanted Extra Tall Cat to pay tribute to the famous "Keep Truckin" logo by Robert Crumb. But not necessarily in this pose coming at 3/4 walk. I would just want a side view.

Looking back over my animation I can clearly see the scenes I was more than happy to animate. I do remember the ones I really like are the scenes that start off as one great drawing. Then they move into slight variations off that main drawing. The particular scenes I am happiest all happen to not follow a strict model but rather have the correct attitude that tells the story visually.

I would like all my stories and scenes to best the best they can and if I can do again what I've explain above then I will have excellent work and great film.

The places I may have gone wrong is when I make a mistake and I do not fix it and it's there echoing for eternity. I want to be the best that I can, to the best of my ability. The hardest part is working alone but that does have it's benefit's too.

I picked up quite a few cels at the Com Convention in San Diego. There was a strange Cartoon Network version of "The Flintstones: On the Rocks" (2001) Directed by Chris Savino and David Smith. The designs look like slightly exaggerated. Very similar to the first pilot. Voices sound like the original cast, slight more mature situation.

Here is a cel of Beavis and Butt-head designed by Mike Judge. It was the only cel of cel that was left of two, I paid $30. There's a lot to learn from the simplicity of that show. Probably one of the most popular cartoons of the 1990'. Anyone who ever grew up is southern california would have know somebody who resembled one, if not both of these unlikeable likeables.

I was never a big Friz Freling fan but I always liked to watch the Pink Panther when I was kid. I thought $40 compared to some of the other cels was a great price. The animation in the feature by Richard Williams always uses to have me running to the television growing up. There was someone else who was interested in this cel the same time I was looking at it. Luckily there were two.

I asked a group a kids watching to help me with the grass, it got done surprisingly fast.

The guy next to me won first place for the "Cartoon Alley".

Here are some pictures I found on the net at the Pasadena Chalk Festival. I was excited to see these so I thought I post them.

FAMILY DOG TREE

Upload Image Time: 1.5 min

Original Size: 12 x 8.5

Resolution: 72

Kind: JPeg (Very High)

MORE THOUGHTS 

SIZE AND COMPRESSION

Here are the images that really sold me on this book.

Super simple images of different kinds of dogs with different shapes and no black outlines.

File Size 

988 KB

Original size 

16 x 23

Resolution 72

Visual Pop ink Pop Culture

These images are printed on the reverse side of the front cover. Note, repeats in color and design boxes but for the most part you can not see the repeat of the dogs.  All dogs have decided shapes but all work is consistent and no one one dominates over another image. 

JPEG AND SIZE TEST

The original image size out of the book was

6 by 10

Scanned 16.5  by 23 (72 dpi) changed to 12 by 6 (300 dpi)

 

size 1.1 MB

time to upload image - under one minute

I had to play with color adjust to get it to look like the picture in the book.  I cranked up the exposure and bought down the outset? The when I got it pretty close over all I had to select the dress and color replace to get it the correct red.  Too much work!!

Understanding 

Scans and Sizes

size 17 by 22

This scan took me three tries. The setting on 

"Save for Web" jpeg - quality set to (Very High).

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Scanning

1st scan - crooked

2nd scan - o.k. save as (tiff to photoshop)

Uploading to Blogger

2 mintutes - Could not upload image first try

Second upload a little over a minute to 

Upload Image

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Why?

I keep looking at the tree silhouetted in the background.  Since I've been working on forests I need some trees that clearly show environment. Note there is only one tree and  ditto for the foreground element: Tree Branch. No black outlines anywhere give the picture freedom of color.

POP INK

This is a paint by number painting I got from the book "Fluffy Humpy Poopy Puppy". It's Charles Spencer Anderson's book in a series called POP INK Visual Pop Culture.  Pop ink merges low art and high design into visual statement, removing them from their original environment renews everything in strange way.

I liked when I read Anderson, "In design, form and function are not opposing ideas. Form lends interest and beauty to the function. Function adds utility and meaning to the form. Good design is effective both aesthetically and functionally."

UNDERSTANDING 

SCANS and SIZES

by Eric Stefani

Here is the same image, now the dog is center and the background sky that I loved is the right color, red (althought the picture in the book is a brighter red!)  

This one was saved using  "save as" in Photoshop which brings up the save for web box and I chose Quality "high" (not max.). The file size is only 1 MB and it took less than a minute to upload.

Also I feel much more organized and at peace since I know what I did and what worked.

Original size 5 1/4 by 7 1/2

Both of these pictures oddly enough open larger in Blogger. Still can not figure why some do and some don't.

UNDERSTANDING 

SCANS AND SIZES

Original Photoshop Size 5 1/4 by 7.5

Here is  a scan I did which default forced me to use "TIFF" in order to get it directly over into PS so I can crop  fix color and change for my needs of inspiration. 9.2 MB.  This was too big when I tried to upload it took too long.   

I now went back to the original and pressed "save as" to save as a "jpeg" setting best as possible under settings. 1.2 MB. The upload time was longer than 30 seconds in fact it took over a minute which is ridiculous! Gave me some time to correct some type-os. Finally at 20 minutes it said "Can't Open Image".  &%$#@!!!

Here is the same scan although I saved it as a Photoshop document. The file size is larger 14 MB. The reason for this test is to find out which scanned items open larger and which do not on Blogger.

Both of these seem to take a about three minutes or longer to upload.   Blogger does not show you how long it take to upload which I find you have to kind of guess.   Can you imagine if you guessed which freeway to take!

Here is a full color illustra- tion I did just out of high school.  It's done in color- ed pencils and has all the band mates.  At the time this was probably my best work to date.  I would probably done it paint now but back then I was really into colored pencils.

Here I adjusted the size of the frame to see if could get the image larger after you click on it.  I'd still rather be playing the piano than figuring out sizes.

Title - Fishbone (1987)

File Size - 15w by 18h

File Kind - JPeg

Materials - Colored Pencil

File Size 7.5

Resolution 300

Here's a flyer I found when "No Doubt" first played opening up for "Fishbone".  I remember the other opening bands were really like "Fishbone".  Fishbone was the wildest sounding music group I'd ever heard.

Our songs back then were covers of the ska bands from england.  We played "Night Club" by The Specials, "Baggy Trousers" by Madness and "Mr. Big Stuff" by that K-Earth band.

Funny this background on this flyer of "the pier" sat doormat for years uncolored until 1998 when I set out to color my first animated film "A Very Fishy Event". Funny the "No Doubt" logo here is in cartoon lettering like 'Mickey Mouse' with the drop shadow and all.  A flyer like this may have taken 2 hours.  Note Chris Dowd and Dirt Walt in the corners.

The "A Very Fishy Event" at the bottom was taken from a t-shirt Bret Palazzo and I were working at.  So weird. It's a perfect name for the cartoon because the band Fishbone never approved the cartoon, I was just making it for the pure delight of it all.

Fishbone Drawings
Dirty Walt Kibby
Norwood Fisher
(Special K) Kendall
Angelo Moore
Chris Dowd

Chris Dowd played keyboards and sang for the band Fishbone. They were one of my favorite bands to see live and listen to on record. I still listen to their albums from the late eighties.

I found this picture in the garage and always thought it was a powerful image.

I like how Chris D. hair is in silhouette and the background trees share the same elements.  Stussy is a brand of clothes sold thru the california beach community.

I remember Chris asking me to hold his jacket while her went to talk to a girl in a store on Melrose in Hollywood, California when I was 17.  This ad was probably around Summer 1986 after their first EP.

Mighty Mouse T-Shirt design by Jeff Pidgon. Ralph Bakshi & John Kricfalusi Producers

I think I had helped with getting the t-shirts silk screened. I may have done the color separations and contacted the printer.  I remember that top font.

My dad brought home a ream of these when I was 7 or 8.  It really got me into drawing and i REMEMBER USING THE BACKS OF THEM TO DRAW ON!! I still have a stack in the garage.
"Crusher" from Bugs Bunny.  This was traced off of one of the many model sheets I got from Cal Arts back in 1987.

While I was clean the garage I found some large portfolios full of artwork.

These images excited me.